Hi Teflon;
Thanks for the response. I look forward to a good discussion here. I've done a lot of typing so far today, although mostly by PM, so this message will not be a long one.
But briefly, from what I see, SWCM uses its proprietary software and architecture to provide email processing and management services to large-scale ISP's. I think the scalability of it's products makes this be something that is not easily commoditized.
In fact I think of SWCM as more of a company that provides infrastructure to the companies (ISP's) that are actually offering the commoditized product of email.
As far as revenue goes, and I may have this wrong, but I think the ISP pays SWCM a per mailbox fee.
If I understand SWCM right, there could be substantial switching costs and barriers to entry, because reliable and scalable email processing is so critical to an ISP and because they seem to be gaining so much acceptance in the marketplace.
The company profile is at software.com
And here is something I just found about SWCM's presence in the marketplace (quoted from a 2/1/99 research report and found at the software.com site)...
"This new Radicati study finds that the market for messaging products reached $1.5 billion in 1998, and is expected to reach $4.7 billion by the year 2002. Deployment of messaging services by ISPs is expected to drive much of the growth of the messaging market in the next four years.
Among software vendors successfully targeting the Internet Service Providers are Software.com, with approximately 62% of the total market, Netscape, with 19% of the total market, and Sun Microsystems, 14% of the total market."
More later, I have a lot left to learn about this company and about the GG. |
